layout: post title: "Tim Bray: RSS: Promise and Peril" created: 1056124440 categories:

• Web Development
• Social Media

I've been really enjoying reading what Tim Bray has to say.

He has some more ideas on uses for RSS. I actually pitched Environment Canada on making RSS feeds of their weather available, with some neat ideas around track-back, where they could aggregate comments made about the weather in Canada -- I thought a great service for Canadians. Their answer basically was "We have a Flash app. We're not interested. What's blogging?"

The "problems" that Tim points out are very specific to the financial industry -- i.e. they aren't risk takers or market leaders. RSS is in its infancy, which just points to opportunity for people that are willing to be first at bat with some new services.

Mentioning my weather app, I should probably just disable the block. I did a few bits of investigation, and it seems as if the source XML feeds are broken somehow.

So, you will perhaps see me developing an RSS feed of weather info. I can go revisit my screen-scraping code from Environment Canada, plus have an excuse to learn RSS syntax. I'm spoiled, because Drupal generates everything for me, so I haven't delved into it yet.

Update: I created a book page called RSS Weather to hold info about this project.